


The Dance

by Missy



Category: Hairspray (2007)
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Reunions, Stream of Consciousness, Wordcount: 500-1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-25
Updated: 2012-11-25
Packaged: 2017-11-19 12:07:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/573095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reunion and remembrance when Tracy comes back to Baltimore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dance

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Cotton Candy Bingo Prompt: Skin. ~~You didn't see my screw up in the description, which i didn't write while half-conscious, no.~~

Tracy never notices what an attractive picture she and Seaweed make together when they’re dancing. Tapping side-by-side on the show with your head on another person’s shoulder it’s hard to figure out the bigger picture – she’s blinded by the lights, too busy concentrating on the new moves she’d crammed into her brain only a week or two before the shoot, feeling the itch of her pantyhose and the heat of the studio’s lights beating down on her back. The show goes out on kinescope every week; she doesn’t see footage of them together until she’s much older, at a reunion special overloaded with well-wishers, crew members, adult kids with overactive imaginations. 

Then she watches them tango to that modern beat and is amazed by the neat-pressed clothing, the smiles on their faces, the flexibility of their knees and the strength of the grip when they slide into hold. She looks lithesome under his touch, winsome and perky as she hasn’t been in forty years.

He brings her a cup of punch and wiggles his eyebrows. “Looking beautiful this evening, Ms. Turnblad.”

She giggles and calls him the most.

It’s like a time machine pulling her back through the years, back to her youth dancing in her livingroom in Baltimore, twisting feverishly without another care in the world, back to studios filled with excitement and holding hands with Link under the artificial starlight of the gym’s overhead lights. She could smell the Midnight in Paris and feel the vibration of an electric guitar under her feet.

It was a temptation she gave into with considerable ease.

*** 

Penny’s mother sent her to a convent school, an utterly intolerable situation for a sixteen year old who had just make a huge splash by dancing with a negro on local television. Tracy had done everything she could to break her best friend out, but the sisters had locked the place tight. Then Seaweed offered to provide his own brand of justice, his own sort of charm, to the situation. 

The nuns were not as impressed with his smoothness as the kids at their highschool.

Seaweed and Tracy found themselves leaning on one another. It was a lot easier to talk to someone who understood their plight, after all, and they both missed Penny so terribly that any differences in class disappeared instantly. Often Link made a third of them, tagging away to drugstores and slugging down milkshakes.

But then Link would head home, and Tracy – alone but not lonely – would ask Seaweed to dance. 

She never noticed until later how powerful a picture they made, or how comfortable Seaweed’s arms were when he spun her around the dance floor. When the music would play their bodies would meld into a single entity, warm and intimately-joined. 

But every night the lights would come up and the record store would empty. Seaweed would help her into her coat as she thanked his mother for wonderful time.

She’d thank him at the bus stop, too.

And Seaweed would peck her on the cheek and sent her back to Link.

 

*** 

At the reunion, there were no obstacles. Link had died among the hundreds of bodies fed to the furnace of the Vietnam War, and Penny had married a jazz trumpeter who had made better appreciation of her chewing jaw. There was brandy and enough wine to make Tracy and Seaweed merrily happy and send them spinning back towards Tracy’s hotel room.

Funny how they made a pretty pattern on the sheets, their bodies tangled together, their differences intertwining. Here there was no room for rancor, for divisionism, for picket lines or division. Soon Tracy didn’t notice anything at all but the way their skin brushed together  
THE END

**Author's Note:**

> This work of fanfiction uses characters from _Hairspray_ , which is the property of John Waters. Infringement for monetary gain has not occurred, and this is a work of fanfiction intended for nonprofit use only.


End file.
